Godmarked
by inkedinserendipity
Summary: As the mortal who restored Te Fiti, Moana's fairly accustomed to receiving gifts - anywhere from bowing and scraping to feasts thrown in her honor. She's even come face-to-face with gods intent on displaying their gratitude. But this offer? This one's new.


"Anything."

"Anything in this realm," says the godly figure in front of her, kneeling atop the waves. He's got little whalefins flapping along his ankles that help a lot for holding off the revelation that Moana is talking to a _major god_. "I'm afraid I cannot offer you anything from the other realms. Pulotu, for example, is outside my domain." He eyes Moana with a hint of amusement curling up his cheeks. "Though knowing what I do of you, mortal Chief, I daresay that a beast of Pulotu would interest you little."

"Yeah," Moana agrees, nodding her head. "No scaly beasts for me. So just to clarify, this includes, like...magic powers and all that."

"That is within my ability, yes."

Moana's been staring at Tagaloa for a long time before she realizes that she's staring. Cheeks flaming, she looks away with abandon. Here she is, gawping at yet another deity. She would've thought that after Punga a couple of months ago she'd be used to this by now.

In her defense, this is _Tagaloa_. There's not too much higher up on the godliness spectrum she can climb.

"Much redder and you're gonna burn," Maui half-mouths, half-whispers from behind her.

Without looking back she lands a solid punch on his shoulder. "Hush. I'm thinking."

He hums. She can easily picture the shit-eating grin on his face. "Looks hard. You sure you don't wanna take a nap, Curly, maybe scrub your eyes a little bit?"

Moana rolls her eyes and restrains herself from whacking him again. Okay. Anything in the world. Anything in the world, anything she wants, she can get it.

Maybe...a pet. That's a cool thing to have, right? Yeah, Maui has all his little birds. Maybe Moana could get, like, a giant turtle to travel with. She could stand on its back and see out for miles and miles, and plus it would be super-useful for scaring baddies out of their minds. Plus, it would scare Pua out of his little white hide, which would be hilarious.

But a turtle's hard to steer, and also a poor replacement for a canoe. Moana frowns. No turtle then. Maybe...maybe she could get, like, water powers or something. Sure would make sailing a lot easier. She could even get them on her oar! How cool would that be? Moana, Chief of Motunui, Master Wayfinder, wielding the power of the sea itself through her trusty oar. She can see it now, her beloved oar wreathed with the markings of the gods, just like Maui's hook. Then she could even decorate her canoe to match!

It would make sailing so much easier, too. She would just have to point her oar in the right direction, and _whoosh_ , out comes the water. Well, granted, Moana's not really sure _how_ water powers would work - would she point it forward and, kind of pull the ocean, or would she more...point it backward and propel herself forward? Also, could she swirl it around really fast to make whirlpools?

Oh yeah, of course she could. This is _Tagaloa_ she's talking about. He did say, literally anything she wanted.

But how would she get rid of the whirlpools afterward? She really doesn't want to leave a trail of destructive water in her wake. Talk about a bad reputation. Is there even a way to...reverse whirlpools? Except maybe pulling up islands, but that would mean she'd have to get Maui to help her get rid of every single one and honestly he'd just be insufferable about it. He certainly doesn't need any more reasons to tease her than he already has.

Moana shrugs. "I don't know," she says, and throws in a hasty-head bow to show her gratitude, focusing on those wiggling little ankle-fins to postpone her inevitable panic until he's gone. "I already have pretty much everything I want. I have my family, and my islands, and the ocean. And I mean I could ask for like, the power to control the ocean, but that would make the ocean less...ocean. It would probably be super rude, it's its own separate being, and taking that away from the ocean...no. I couldn't do that. That's not what I want."

"Offered the choice of anything in the world, and you would opt for nothing?"

Moana winces. "It's not that I don't appreciate the offer, really," she says, and consciously slows her words to let her sincerity show. "It's...it's an honor, and one that I'm flattered beyond words to receive. But...I can't think of anything."

"Nothing?" Tagaloa, Moana is a bit relieved to see, is watching her with something close to amusement. "Nothing you find valuable?"

Instinctively, Moana looks toward Maui, and shrugs again. "Not really. I've already got everything I need."

On Maui's chest, Mini-Moana nods her head in agreement. She squints at the tiny rendition of herself for a couple of seconds, an idea niggling at the corner of her mind, and she stands on the deck staring awkwardly at Maui with her eyelids practically paper-thin before she seizes the thought.

"Scratch that," she blurts. "I mean, pardon me. I've had an idea. There might be, um, something."

"Oh?"

The words coalesce slowly on Moana's tongue, and she reels them in one-by-one. "That," she starts slowly, and jabs her finger in Maui's direction. "I want that."

Maui follows her hand all the way to himself, then turns to look behind him, like he's expecting to find someone else standing there. He's greeted with nothing but a calm expanse of ocean, then turns back to her, bewildered.

Tagaloa seems similarly confused. "You want...Maui."

"What? No! I mean, I guess he was kinda a proactive gift, since he came from the gods and all, but he's already family. I mean, I already have him. And Tagaloa knows - I mean, you know - that I don't need more than one of him." She laughs kind of uncomfortably, aware that she's rambling but also unable to stop. "That would be a disaster. So. Um. Anyway, yes...not Maui. Just...that. His tattoo."

"You'd like a tattoo of yourself."

Moana's never had to try quite this hard to keep from rolling her eyes at a deity, and she lives with the worst of the lot. "No, I want a tattoo of him."

Tagaloa and Maui blink in eerie synchronicity. "Please," she adds as an afterthought.

Maui stares at her for a long, long time, shock and some other indecipherable emotion warring on his face. "Moana..." he says, and his voice is quiet.

"Hush. This is my gift. You don't get a say."

"I just wanted to - "

"Nope!" Moana cuts him off cheerily. "Nope, your protests can wait for afterward." She turns toward Tagaloa, pleased with her choice. "That's my final answer," she tells him, rapping the butt of her oar against the deck. "Locked in. No take-backs."

Tagaloa's silent for long enough that it makes her nervous that she's crossed some line. "Um, you can do that, right?"

That elicits a quiet laugh from him, and he shakes his head, smiling at some joke unknown to her. "Of course I can, young Moana. Here, step closer."

She obliges with trepidation, suddenly feeling very small next to him. Which is funny, because she spends a lot of her life literally dwarfed by Maui and she's never felt tiny next to him. Not in this intimidating, powerful sort of way, anyway. She focuses on his little fins to distract herself as he rises to his feet in front of her.

"This will not hurt," Tagaloa reassures her. Then, in an undertone, quiet enough that Maui cannot hear, he says, "It is a powerful thing that you have chosen to do, young Chief."

Moana smiles at that, and suddenly her nervousness is gone, replaced by a sort of soothing calm that reminds her of warm nights on the ocean, of gentle giants with blue skin humming in the water around her. "I know."

Tagaloa dips his head to her the barest of fractions, then presses two of his fingers to her collarbone. Moana recoils instinctively from the touch, expecting the typical pain of a tattoo to bloom from the spot. But after her initial panic recedes she feels nothing more than a gentle tickling sensation along her skin. And when she looks down, there's a small rendition of Maui aboard a canoe.

Aboard _their_ canoe.

He has one hand tilted toward the sky, squinting toward it with a grin spread across his face. In his other he holds his hook, the curved tip brushing against the deck.

Moana finds herself beaming stupidly at the tattoo, cricking her neck awkwardly to try to get a better look. It's the work of several moments to tug her skin down far enough that she can really see it, but when she looks back up there are, embarrassingly, the beginnings of tears in her eyes.

"Thank you," she says. "It's perfect."

Tagaloa looks from Moana, then to Maui, then back, and smiles. "I know."

Then he turns from the deck of their boat. In an impossibly graceful, flowing motion, he dives from the wood. In the second before he hits the water he slips soundlessly into the waves in the form of a whale, not a ripple spreading outward from his point of disappearance.

"Huh," Moana grins, peering over the prow. "That was pretty cool. Probably even another for the legends! What did you - Maui?"

She turns back to find him staring at her with wide eyes, fingers senseless around the handle of his hook, his jaw still slack.

"If you're not careful you'll catch bugs in that mouth," she tries, hoping it'll lessen some of the shock from his face. "Maui, are you okay?"

She steps closer and realizes he's tearing up.

"Oh - hey, it's all right," she says. "I, uh...thought you would like it?"

He barks out a laugh, looks away from her as he scrubs at his face with his wrist. "Like it?" he asks, voice not quite stable and a bit breathless. "Moana, I..."

"Am impressed? Love the look?"

Maui just keeps shaking his head, eyes trained on the deck and away from her. Moana frowns at him, and gives into the irrational urge to double-check to make sure it really is Maui on her chest. Nope, it's definitely him, down to the smugly confident grin. She's not even sure who else it could be, honestly. There's already a tattoo of a manta ray curling along her lower back.

"Hey," she says softly, stepping toward him. "Are you okay?"

When he looks at her again, he's crying. Well and truly crying, with a crumpled face and hitched breath and everything. Moana's very familiar with the sort of overwhelmed, disbelieving awe that puts the expression that Maui's wearing on her face, the pile of emotions that stacks up one by one until you're not sure whether you want to cry or laugh or maybe just curl up and sleep for a little while.

"We match," he chokes out.

"Yeah," Moana replies softly, and when she says "that was the idea," it's way less sarcastic than it sounded in her head. "I thought it would be...good, y'know? I'm always over your heart, and I wanted you to be over mine, too. Forever, because that's where you belong."

His hands fidget at his sides, the same little motion he does when he wants to pick her up but isn't sure if he should, so she steps forward and wraps her arms around his chest. He's trembling around her, little tremors that she can feel against her own skin. "There there," she says fondly, and pats the closest part of him.

It's disgraceful, honestly. Her hands hardly reach around his ribs. Meanwhile, Maui could probably reach his own shoulders, winding his arms around her. He doesn't, though - instead he lets one of his hands rest on the back of her head, cradling her tenderly against him. There's a gentle pressure against the top of her head as he buries his face in her hair.

It's not often Maui gets emotional, or sentimental about anything really, but when he does, he's off-balance for hours. That's her demigod - never does anything by halves.

Too early, he lets her go. He stands back and looks at her like he's never quite seen her before, like he looks at the setting sun during their evenings along the beach, shocked and a bit breathtaken.

"Feeling better?"

"Yeah," he says. "Moana, anything in the world, and you got..." he asks, still sounding unsteady, "...that?"

"Yeah," she replies, and prods the tattoo with her two fingers. "Oh man, I really should've asked him if this one's gonna move like yours do. But, uh, yeah. That's what I wanted."

"You realize you could've gotten anything, right? Water powers, or a trip to Tagaloa's realm, or - or the coolest canoe in the world - "

"I know," she cuts him off. "I know. I thought about those. But as amazing as wayfinding is, and having a really sturdy canoe that'll never fall apart, or the power to create a whirlpool or something..." she shrugs, smiles at him. "Some things are more important."

Maui squeezes his eyes shut against her words. He blinks them open slowly, after several long seconds, and he just looks at her.

The tiny depiction of him is stark against her skin, engraved in a black ink the exact same shade as Maui's. Even down to the dumb little hair that sprouts from Mini-Maui's head, perfectly symmetrical and wavy, her tattoo looks like it could've been one of his, the same style and same make. And just like his, it's perched right over her heart.

From the look on his face, Moana doesn't think he missed that last fact.

"Thank you," he says, and pulls her close to him once more.

Inside her cocoon of Maui's arms, Moana smiles softly to herself, rests her forehead against his chest. Beneath her hair lies the tattoo of a curly-haired wayfinder, eternally smiling out to the world. It feels right to her that against her chest rests a second curly-haired wayfinder, this one maybe a bit bigger and a bit more boisterous, but beloved all the same.

In the space between their arms, two hearts beat as one.


End file.
